After presenting a psychological portrait of David Hume on the background of the 18th century’s cultural history, the author develops the following theses: I. The sense and target of all Hume’s philosophical reasoning (especially of his rejection of the ontological status of the categories of substance and cause as well as of his theory of moral sentiments) consisted in preparing the ground for a skeptical destruction of all statements concerning the being and nature of God and for substantiating the conception according to which man can live morally without being anchored in religious transcendence. II. All strongly inconsistent parts of Hume’s philosophy are unified by Hume’s (usually clandestine) effort to uproot religion; it is just this point of „synthesis“ which enables us to grasp the meaning of them – and of the otherwise ungraspable inner unity of Hume’s philosophy. III. The rejection of the ontological status of the category of substance (as treated in the context with the problem of the teleological argument for God’s existence) results necessarily in Hume’s anticipatory outline of the principal ideas of an evolutionary approach and theory of self-organization, which in all likelihood directly influenced the conceptions of Charles Darwin.